Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

1) Based on the reading, how have current feminist studies ignored or even perpetuated misconceptions about women's relationship with neoliberalism? What sort of studies would you propose to highlight this relationship (i.e. correct what is missing in feminist studies)? 2) Other than embracing neoliberalist concepts of private property, how else might you resolve the tension between "women's work" and "men's work"? Along with this, how might you value "women's work" economically? In society? In government policies and structure?

One of my earlier blogs talks about US intervention in Aghanistan and the earlier support for Taliban offered by the US. This blog continues that conversation thread further. One of my students is studying the portrayals of "freeing Afghan women" that circulated in the US media during the US intervention in Afghanistan, further exploring the ways in which women in/from the Middle East construct, participate in and resist these images. In recounting a story of one of her interviews, she shared with me how a feminist scholar from the Middle East discarded postcolonial theory, stating that "Afghanistan really is backward. They don't even have a railway system." This statement stayed with me the entire evening, and here I am posting this message after much thought. When I begin with the notion, what really is backward, I also have to ask myself who gets to define the discursive frame of advanced/backward. The dominant logic of Western empires have historically scrip...